JANUARY 19 2019
RAPTURE EQUALS RAPE EQUALS DEATH.
The Latin verb RAPIO (I seize), RAPUI (I have seized), RAPTUM (been seized), also means “to snatch and tear away.” It clearly shows that RAPE and RAPTURE have a common root.
We know what RAPE entails. Do we really know what RAPTURE portrays?
Why has American Christianity become so enthralled by RAPTURE?
First a detour.
Just before Ascension the disciples asked Jesus one last question: “When will you establish the kingdom of Israel”, meaning the restoration of the Davidic Empire? (Acts 1: 6).
After a three-year direct exposure to the Son of God, his mission was still totally misunderstood by his disciples.
No wonder theological confusion is still rampant. If Jesus failed to convince his support group of 12 down-to-earth fishermen of his true mission, how, in the world, relying on a fallible church with fallible preachers, can the GOOD NEWS reach us?
Well, by and large, it cannot.
It seems to me that then as now, the entire mission God sent his son to accomplish is misunderstood. It is NOT to save sinners, that too, but his primary mission was to restore the cosmos to its intended glory (John 3: 16).
Sad to say, the opposite is happening: the Good News –eu-angelos – which leads to LIFE has become the Bad News – kak-angelos – which leads to DEATH, thanks to RAPTURE.
Take the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 A.D. It seems that Jesus alludes to this event when he advises his followers in Matthew 24 (that famous chapter dealing with the LAST DAYS but also supposedly referring to the year 70) to flee the city and refrain from participating in the armed revolt against the Roman regime. The incorrect interpretation of the Jewish faith led to the total eradication of the temple, the city of Jerusalem and the entire region of Palestine.
The Crusades were another venture that, even today, some 800-900 years later (1096-1291) still has ominous overtones in the Muslim world, seeing Western intervention in that region as attempts to Christianize the Middle East, and still now preventing the Western gospel to penetrate.
It is my thesis that in these last days the erroneous interpretation of the Church’s mission will result in the destruction of the world as we know it, thanks to the RAPTURE fallacy.
Can the church still change its mission?
This brings me to the burning question? Has the church really any idea why it is in the world, what its task is today? Has the church really changed at all since the year 400 A.D. when it became the official religion in the dying days of the Roman Empire?
It is my contention that we live in the LAST DAYS, literally. The Bible contends that the Last Days started with the resurrection, now some 2,000 years ago. And that is true, but what we now are experiencing is the real last days of humanity. Compared to a clock, we live in the last minute of time, very close to midnight or, better, very close to dawn, the Daybreak of the New Creation.
What is the church’s message today?
There’s a very interesting episode in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Dostoevsky’s last book. It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest.
In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.”
Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?”
Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.”
Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.”
End of story.
“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free” (John 8: 32).
The church of days past and the church of today rather not give the people a free hand, because it leads to confusion and personal preference. But that is good: God hates uniformity, just look at creation. Without freedom there is no struggle. Once we are deprived of freedom, the will of our captors rules us.
Back to the Old Testament
Today there is in the USA a desire to establish some sort of Old Testament society, abolishing democracy, installing a KING, and being governed by the literal rules of the TEN COMMANDMENTS, (stoning female adulterers, for instance), getting rid of Jesus altogether and doing away with the LOVE commandment.
Enter Bonhoeffer (again).
Bonhoeffer read it correctly when he, upon leaving the USA in 1939, and returning to Germany under Hitler, said,
“God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God. Anything of the churches of the Reformation which has come to America either stands in conscious seclusion and detachment from the general life of the church or has fallen victim to Protestantism without Reformation. …
American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of ‘criticism’ by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s ‘criticism’ touches even religion, the Christianity of the churches and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics. A symptom of this is the general adherence to natural theology. In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics. But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness. The decisive task for today is the dialogue between Protestantism without Reformation and the churches of the Reformation.”
No Reformation means the continuation of an ecclesiastical system based on the Old Testament, with a High Priest (Pope, mega church preachers), while keeping the laity immature.
No Reformation means the continuation of the NATURE/GRACE dualism, where nature is seen as evil and grace the gift of heaven.
Bonhoeffer also coined PIOUS GODLESSNESS, the mainstay of the American Religion, so thoroughly condemned by Dr. Harold Bloom, in his classic THE AMERICAN RELIGION.
In that book he states that American Christianity has ceased to be Christian, totally drenched in GNOSTICISM, basically stating that the earth is the product of the Demi-Urge, a personification of the Devil, and thus to be abused with abandon. In other words, American Religion believes “The earth is Evil”.
Its most influential high priest still is Hal Lindsey and his THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH, with its false RAPTURE proclamation, a thesis that is still the most widely held belief in American life and a pure product of the Devil who now rules much of the church.
BEWARE OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS.
Take the new regime in Brazil. The new president there, as if to signal his intent to permit greater destruction of the world’s biggest rain forest, has appointed a Foreign Minister who believes Climate Change is an anti-Christian plot by “cultural Marxists” seeking to criminalize red meat, oil and heterosexual sex.
He also has appointed an anti-abortion evangelist to head a new ministry overseeing Indigenous groups, women and human rights.
President Trump promptly congratulated the new president, a man totally in line with the beliefs of his base, the Evangelical Church, the greatest danger to God’s creation.
ENTER POMPEO
In setting out the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, one of the first things Mike Pompeo, the USA Secretary of State, made clear, while visiting the Middle East, was that he had come to the region as “as an evangelical Christian”.
In his speech at the American University in Cairo, Pompeo said that in his state department office: “I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth.”
In a visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”.
Both Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force.
“We will continue to fight these battles,” Pompeo said at the Summit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … “until the rapture”. Be part of it. Be in the fight.”
UNTIL THE RAPTURE!! UNTIL THE RAPTURE!!
For Pompeo’s audience, the rapture invokes an apocalyptical Christian vision of the future, a final battle between good and evil, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, when the faithful will ascend to heaven and the rest will go to hell.
For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as pre-millennial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy.
It directly colors views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indirectly, attitudes towards Iran, broader Middle East geopolitics and the primacy of protecting Christian minorities. “Pompeo knows best how his faith interacts with his political beliefs and the duties he undertakes as secretary of state,” said Stan van den Berg, senior pastor of Pompeo’s church in Wichita. “Suffice to say, he is a faithful man, he has integrity, he has a compassionate heart, a humble disposition and a mind for wisdom.”
Here’s the real danger.
Here is where total destruction comes in: These “Evangelicals” want to help God in bringing on Armageddon, destroying The Evil Earth through nuclear bombs, as Christian Zionism has become the “majority theology” among white US Evangelicals, who believe that events in Israel are prophesied in the Bible.
The comparison is made explicitly in The Trump Prophecy, a religious film screened in 1,200 cinemas around the USA in October, depicting a retired firefighter who claims to have heard God’s voice, saying: “I’ve chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.”
Yes, American Christianity sees the earth as evil, and destroying the earth as its mission. With a Pompeo in charge, and a Bolton, and a Trump, belief in RAPTURE means belief in RAPING the earth, and, to top it all, these people believe this to be the CHRISTIAN thing to do, while Rapture really means cursing God and embracing the Devil.
Remember, “Silence in the face of this evil is itself evil – God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act”.
RAPTURE has caused the RAPE of creation. RAPTURE destroys the earth which God, upon its completion, called GOOD seven times. This makes Creation holy because God made it.
RAPTURE is the ultimate sin for which there is no pardon. That’s why RAPTURE IS THE RELIGION OF DEATH and OF THE DEVIL.
Jesus came to bring LIFE, life on the renewed earth for which he gave his life (John 3: 16).